Any good file syncing/drive replacements? My Synology exists pretty much because Synology Drives works so well syncing Mac and iOS.

I went from cloud to local smb shares to nextcloud to seafile. Really happy with the latter. Works, no bloat, versioning and some file sharing. The pro version is free with 3 or less usernames. I use the cli client to mount the libraries into folders and share that with smb + subst X: into the root directory on laptops for family. Borgbackup of that offsite for backup.

I've read good things about Seafile and have considered setting it up on my Homelab... though when I looked at the documentation, it too seemed quite large and I worried it wouldn't be the lightweight solution I'm looking for.

Seafile works pretty well. The iOS app is ass though. Everything else is rock solid.

Where does it store metadata like the additional file properties you can add? Does it use Alternate Data Streams for anything?

Does the AI run locally?

For anyone who might find it useful, here's a Reddit thread from 3 years ago on a few concerns about SeaFile I'd love to see revisited with some updated discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/wzdp2p/are_ther...

Seems like the AI runs wherever you want it - you enter an API endpoint.

https://manual.seafile.com/13.0/extension/seafile-ai/

You might like Peergos, which is E2EE as well. Disclosure (I work on it).

https://peergos.org

You can try it out easily here: https://peergos-demo.net

Our iOS app is still in the works still though.

Syncthing is great, but doesnt offer selective sync or virtual files if you need those features.

Owncloud infinite scale might be the best option for a full featured file sync setup, as thats all it does.

It’s not selective sync, but you can get something similar with Ignore Files [1] in SynchThing. This functionality can also be configured via the webGUI and within apps such as MobiusSync [2].

1. https://docs.syncthing.net/users/ignoring.html

2. https://mobiussync.com

I think you could replace Nextcloud's syncing and file access use cases with Syncthing and Copyparty respectively. IMO the biggest downside is that Copyparty's UX is... somewhat obtuse. It's super fast and functional, though.

Pretty happy with Resilio Sync. I use it on Mac, and linux in a docker container.

It is proprietary: it has words license and price on their page => crapware.

rsync, ftp, and smb have all existed for decades and work very well on spotty, slow connections (maybe not smb) and are very, very small utilities.

Copyparty. Found that recently and absolutely love it.

Unison. Unfortunately it has no mobile apps, though.